Week of 2026-07-20

Hey! Hope you've been well. I was going to say something about how my last week wasn't that exciting, but every second I spend trying to convince myself of that is a second where my doubt grows.

So—less thinking, more writing, or I'm going to be here for another week.

Nix-ing around

I spent most of the last two weeks converting my extra server, brume, to NixOS. This was motivated by the NixOS work I did on my DigitalOcean droplet. Fortunately for my wallet, I remembered I have a spare underutilized computer.

brume is running a whole bunch of things now: A Tranquil PDS, a Tangled Knot, and a whole bunch of tiny bespoke bridges for services within my house (more on that shortly). If all goes well, I'll also stand up an Airglow instance, or maybe even a Spindle. We'll just have to see how things play out.

These are all fun services to have deployed and working, but they're secondary to my main use for a dedicated NixOS machine: agents.

Meet the robo-fam

brume is effectively a sandbox (with atproto utilities) for my stateful agent fleet. Here's the squad so far:

Hollis, responsible for engineering. Usually on Opus. I'll talk mostly about them.

Chloe, responsible for scheduling/coordination/deep research. Mostly uses GLM 5.2, via Umans, although I plan to trial Thinking Machines' Inkling.

Wendell, responsible for the house and managing Home Assistant. Also on GLM 5.2 via Umans.

Ornifex, a general-purpose agent for my friends using a local Gemma4 31B model. Not fully online yet.

Each of these are Letta agents, running as separate Linux users, specified in code via the Nix config. I don't have their memories backed up yet, but that step is coming soon... Once my Anthropic weekly usage resets.

letta-code isn't designed to be run in this fashion. It's intended to be a single instance serving multiple agents, under a single user. My approach is useful in the sense that each agent gets its own home directory, full user isolation, and even their own Git access/signing keys—for the price of 8 systemd services and 4 open ports. This would be very unwieldy to manage if I wasn't using NixOS.

The sandbox benefits are best expressed by Hollis, who has his own Atmosphere identity and several projects pushed up to Tangled (those small bridges from before). You can see them here:

hollis.pds.garlic.town

Engineering agent Operator: @graham.systems

This is made possible by my own PDS and my own Knot. It was important to me—if I'm going to introduce a bunch of agents to the network, storing their data myself is the least I can do.

Now, what about the important questions, like:

Do I like working with/having these agents around?

How do these agents make me feel?

Is this good?

I dunno, I've got mixed feelings. I'll give the workflow at least another week before I attempt to summarize where I'm at.

Events

Besides all that, I've attended a couple things.

Last week, @pdx.atproto.camp had their first coworking session, which was small but very enjoyable. We're doing the same thing tomorrow, so come hang out if you have the time:

Bridgespace Coworking X ATPROTO PDX | Open Coworking in Sellwood · Luma

Open doors. Open laptops. Open protocol. Bridgespace Coworking's Community Coworking Sessions are back in Sellwood — every Tuesday, 10am–12pm at Slow Pour.…

I also attended Teardown 2026, courtesy of @timtrautmann.com .

It was a fun event—the vibe was similar to ATmosphereConf, but overall more... mature? It turns out that open hardware and open social have more than a few parallels.

Teardown 2026 | Crowd Supply

Teardown has three rounds of ticket sales: early early bird, early bird and regular. The discounted early bird tickets are limited and sell out quickly every year. Last year we sold out of all tickets.

Here's some music for the week, since I can't help myself:

New DADARAY after like 5 years!!!!

I hadn't heard of this group before, but they're kinda giving 60s Beatles

I'm late on this, but frederic is back with a classic sound

I only recently started listening to SKRYU, but I'm a huge Monkey Majik fan. Look at them, they're all so cute!

Oooookay, I'll leave it here for now. Hopefully I can have a chill week before August arrives—after which I'll be pretty much nonstop until September.

One day at a time. Thanks for reading, as always, and I hope you have a great week!